Hugo Schwyzer

Mythago links to this post by “jolt” about women, ageing, and objectification. Read the post, and the one to which she also links.

Jolt writes:

I have definitely experienced all sorts of verbal harrasment, but not as frequently as I used to. It may be that years of suffering these unwarranted intrusions have made me oblivious a lot of the time, worn down from the constant onslaught. But I think it’s also that now I am in my late 30s I have moved from “potentially fuckable and thus subject to any and all pestering that any idiot male chooses to provide” to “eh, not old, but why bother.”

Part of me is really enjoying this slide into the invisibility of females over 35. Part of me is just pissed off. Look, I don’t need the hassle, but when even the lack of hassle pulls you into the swirl of the patriarchy and assigns you your rank therein, it’s annoying as hell.

Obviously, one of the most insidious aspects of patriarchal culture is the way in which it teaches women to assess their own value through the desire that they arouse in men. Even more toxic is that your average 17 year-old girl will receive more catcalls and sexualized comments on the street than her 45 year-old mother. No less an authority than the infamous John Derbyshire insists that women hit their “sell by” date somewhere around twenty.

Of course, rude, crass, and decidedly unwanted sexual attention can be annoying and disillusioning at best — and soul-scarring at worst. Yet we teach young women that that attention — no matter how vulgar — is a measure of their value. It’s easy to dismiss that connection intellectually, but I’ve known plenty of women who have found, much to their own frustration, that on some level they’ve “bought in” to this notion that strange men on the street do have the power to assign their value.

As a forty year-old man on the cusp of what was, traditionally, middle-age, I am ever more keenly aware of my male privilege. I’ve been teaching full-time since I was 27 (and I was a very young-looking 27 when I started). In my first few years, I felt as if my youthfulness was an obstacle to being taken seriously. I felt as if a great many of my students were asking themselves, “How much can he possibly know? He looks too young to be a professor.”

In the last thirteen years, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience. That experience has made me a better teacher, of course. But I also am keenly aware that ageing has brought me a degree of respect from my students and colleagues that I simply did not enjoy when I was younger. In 1994, my students looked at me as a slightly older peer, and I know that for some, that proved an obstacle to their learning. While in those early years I received far more validation for being “cute” or “hot” than I do these days, the concomitant perceived lack of gravitas compromised my legitimacy as a teacher.

I’ve heard from a number of female friends in my age group (late thirties, early-to-mid forties) who are coping with what jolt so accurately calls the “slide into invisibility of females over 35.” These are accomplished, creative, brilliant, interesting, beautiful women. None defines herself solely by her sex appeal, but several have quietly pointed out their own considerable ambivalence about ageing and this increasing “invisibility.”

Earlier this year, right before my 40th birthday, I was telling a group of colleagues in the faculty “party room” about how excited I was to be hitting this chronological milestone. One of my female peers reminded me, gently, that my enthusiasm was at least in part tied to male privilege. There is little that men lose by ageing, she noted. Not only do we traditionally tend to see older men as more desirable, even when older men lose their looks, we don’t hold their slide into middle-age against them. I can’t remember exactly what her words were, but my colleague — who has known me since I first came on board at the college — said something like “What you, Hugo, lose in ‘youthful hotness’ you gain in ‘weight’; men who get older don’t get noticed less, they just get noticed differently. Women sometimes don’t get noticed at all.” (She had a cleverer way of saying it than that, and when I remember it, I’ll revise this post!)

I’ve written many times about the “older men, younger women” problem. Make no mistake, our cultural obsession with sexualizing very young women is inextricably linked to a dismissiveness of “older” women’s desirability. While the catcalls and the wolfwhistles and the cheesy pick-up lines may become less common (to a not inconsiderable amount of relief on the part of their targets), as jolt writes, “even the lack of hassle pulls you into the swirl of the patriarchy and assigns you your rank therein.”

I’m really, really, really happy being forty. I like my wrinkles. I like watching my body change. Age is not my enemy today. To put it simply, when I was a boyish 27 I felt my youth was a decided liability in my work; at 40, I have no such concerns. But even when I enjoyed the flattery, I never connected my worth to my (brief) status as the “young hottie” on the faculty. Male privilege meant that my perceived attractiveness was essentially irrelevant to my work as a professor, and its disappearance has not impacted my credibility. The same has not, I’m sorry to say, always been true in the experience of my colleagues. And in that sense, the freedom to celebrate ageing without a trace of anxiety is, at least in part, considerably easier for men.